I've been quietly rebuilding what success means to me

Somewhere between being a businesswoman and becoming a mother I realised that the version of success I had been working towards was one I thought I wanted based on societal expectations rather than one I had actually chosen. I had to pause and truly reflect and I knew that something had to change because that version of success didn't make sense to me anymore. I had spent quite a lot of time ensuring that everything looked right and ticked the right boxes but internally the success just didn't feel entirely mine.

The strange thing about building a career is that it can happen alongside you rather than because of you. You make good decisions, accumulate the right credentials, show up in the right rooms, and one day you look at what you've built and realise it belongs to a version of you that no longer quite exists. The ambition was real. The work was real. But somewhere in the execution, you started building for an audience rather than for yourself.

That recognition is uncomfortable. And it takes courage to sit with it rather than push it back down and keep going.

Becoming a mother sharpened something within me. My ambition didn't change in its relevance to the pursuit of my goals but how I carried and reflected it changed. I now have a quiet ambition. I'm still hungry and perhaps some might even say that I'm greedy. But I have a laser focus on my goals now that has been sharpened because of motherhood. I'm locked in because I am determined to live my life fully for myself and for my daughter to see what is possible for her in this world.

This means I have had to unlearn, and I'm still unlearning, the old version of success that I tied my identity to.

That unlearning is not a small thing. Identity is stubborn. The version of yourself you've been performing for long enough starts to feel like the real one. You forget which parts were chosen and which parts were adopted because they were easier to present in professional spaces. The work of separating those things out, of asking yourself honestly what you actually want versus what you've been conditioned to pursue, is some of the most demanding work I've ever done and it doesn't have a clear endpoint.

This is something that comes with the nuance of being a Black woman in business.

For Black women in professional spaces the gap between who you are and who you think the world needs to see is part of our safety and security for survival. We spend a lot of time reading rooms, calibrating our language and tone, figuring out how much of ourselves is safe to bring into spaces that weren't designed to hold all of us and so much more.

Sometimes it's strategic and makes perfect sense because of course we need to protect ourselves in a world that hasn't always protected us. But sometimes, like I started to recognise in myself, it becomes something else entirely. The calibration becomes automatic. The adjustments happen before you've even made a conscious decision. And then one day you notice that you've stopped saying certain things out loud, not because you've changed your mind about them but because the professional version of you decided they didn't fit. That is self-erasure and it is exhausting in a way that's very hard to name when you're in the middle of it because from the outside everything looks fine. More than fine, it’s successful.

The particular cruelty of it is that the more polished the performance, the harder it becomes to recognise as a performance at all.

I spent 20 years in PR understanding how reputations are built and how perception is managed. What I've had to sit with more recently is how fluently I applied all of that expertise to managing my own presentation. And how at some point the line between strategic self-presentation and quiet self-suppression became very difficult to locate.

I spoke about some of this on the Milk and Mummies podcast recently in a conversation about building a successful career without losing yourself. Things came out of that conversation that I'd been carrying quietly for a long time. I surprised myself with what I was willing to share and open up about and that in and of itself is also a reflection of how much I continue to grow and change.

If you want to hear the full conversation you can watch it here:

The version of success I'm building now has more of me in it. It has more honesty about what I actually value and more of the things I stopped saying out loud. It's a more demanding version, if I'm being honest, because it requires me to know myself well enough to build toward something real rather than something that simply looks right from the outside.

That demand is not a burden. It's actually the most energising thing I've felt in years. There is something clarifying about deciding that the standard you're building toward is yours rather than borrowed. The goals don't shrink. If anything they sharpen. But they start to feel like yours in a way that makes the pursuit of them feel different.

I'm still figuring this all out. But I'm glad that I have this new awareness.

I feel far more successful now than I have ever been before. And I'm only just getting (re)started.